5:49 AM 1/31/2003

The difference between ignorance and stupidity:
Show an ignorant person the truth and they will be enlightened.
Show a stupid person the truth and they will be entertained.
Stupid people love the truth - it is more fun to play with.

Bible rants: the end of the world as we know it.
I saw on some educational TV show that mankind is simpler than they
thought.  Sometime about one hundred thousand years ago the entire
human race was reduced to only a few thousand people over the face
of the earth.  They figured this out by backtracking genetic drift and
trying to account for simularities and differences between different
races.  Turns out there is not as much variance as there ought to be,
given the apparent age of man.  Now, there are extremist Bible thumpers
who would be pleased to note this - it appears, at first blush, that a
younger mankind would mean the argument about the earth being only
six thousand years old would be true.  

What has happened, these scientists say, is that this one hundred
(plus) thousand year ago, winnowing was caused by a cataclsym of
'biblical proportions', either a blanket of volcanic dust over the entire
world or the venerable 'meteor striking the earth' scenario.  What
happened doesn't really matter at this resolve - the important thing
is that mankind lost some of it's warehouse of survival traits.  Who
knows what we were like before this meteor/volcano/godzilla
ran us through the catastrophic filter?

There are more people in the world reading and trying to understand
the Christian Bible than ever before.  This is an easy statement to
make and it is the truth, if only because there are more people in
the world today than there have ever been - that we can recall.
Another extreme of Bible thumpers suppose that Mankind, the human
race, is actually about five hundred thousand years old (or six thousand
minus seven days).  Suppose, during all this time, the herd was being
periodically thinned out.  Suppose, during a short time before each
winnowing, the human race exploded into massive overinhabitation
of the globe (this would not take many people in less technological
civilizations).  Suppose we are in one such melting pot at the present.

Enter a possible biblical compatible version of the end of the world.

Of all the books of the bible (or the Bible, depending on how you
were raised), the most popular in reading circles is Revelation.  Now,
this is a letter written by some guy on the isle of Patmos who had
a dream.  Catchy title.  Lots of blood, gore, disease, pestilance,
moral chastising and so forth.  One item stands out in my mind about
this prophetic bit of literature - 144,000.  When I was young and
only slightly more ignorant than I am now, I believed that this meant
that only 144,000 of the whole human race would be lifted into heaven
and the rest would be scorched off the planet.  One question seared
through my young and ignorant mind - why such a small number?  If
there are only 144,000 true believers out of six billion humans, the
world would be in pretty poor shape to begin with.  I used to think
I wanted to be one of them.  Now, thinking of the end of the world
on a different line, I am not so sure.  I think I'd rather get the heck
out of Dodge before it gets to the tribulations point.

Why be chicken about it?  Well, consider again the extent of this
global catastrophic phenomen.  If it were only smoke and clouds from
some volcano, then you'd have to survive through an ice age such as
has not been seen for, lo, these 144,000 years.  Funny how this number
keeps popping up.  Maybe we are only searching for odd places in
the manuscript to place it, like feng shei wordsmiths.  But on to what
these 144,000 lucky people would be facing: famine, bitter cold, no
television - they would not be happy campers, I can tell you that.
And this is if the only thing they had to face was bad weather.  The
prophecy mentions wars, disease, pestilence and, oh yeah, spooky
guys on spooky horses running around killing people for sport.

Translated into modern imagery, this means: First we have too many
people, then food shortages, then disease.  Of course we should not
be too unhappy about this because someone with an eye toward global
pacification will come along and try to take over the world.  There
follows fire, heavens falling, the earth upheaving.  

All of the aforementioned factors have one thing in common - they kill people.
So what was, before, an overpopulated earth, will shortly become a nice
scrubbed little planet with only a few of the pesky humans around to litter it up.
The 144,000.  On a world devastated by war, earthquake, volcanoes and
possibly meteor strikes.

You know what that environment would look like.  Mud.  Slime.  Debris
from a ruined world.  Dead and rotting carcasses all over the place.
Probably, with the way mankind's luck was running, all the tools and
living quarters would be destroyed, as well.  This is 'Survivor' on a
superlative scale, with one difference - you don't vote people off.
Why?  Because fewer people does not equate to more stuff left for
the remainder.  Fewer people means the human race ceases to exist.
Breed, little survivors.  Be fruitful and multiply.

Oh.  And be careful of that tree, over in the corner of the garden.
There's a snake in it.